The upcoming Congo and Yukon platforms have been hailed by many as AMD's answer to the Intel Atom platform. However, the chipmaker has come out and said, categorically, that it does not plan to compete in the Netbook arena and that its new chipsets are meant for ultra-thin-and-light machines like the MacBook Air (pictured).
But if we take a look at the market, the very definition of what makes a Netbook is changing. Not only is it hittiSng screen sizes previously reserved for ultraportables, there is even talk of putting a discrete graphics card into an Eee PC. The low-cost factor of Netbooks is also slowly being thrown out the window with some machines going over the S$1,000 (US$669.21) mark. Bahr Mahony, director of AMD Notebook Product Marketing also commented that the high return rate of Netbooks in Europe show that users were not satisfied with the performance of this class of machines.
On the other hand, with dual-core Atom chips already used in Nettops, it is only a matter of time when Netbooks hit a performance envelope close to that of full-fledged ultraportables. Will AMD eat its words then? Only time will tell.
Source : http://asia.cnet.com/
